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Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

Hello. I am using grub4dos on a large USB drive that is formatted as NTFS. I am trying to boot BT4.iso, and it begins to load, however it seems to get stuck in an infinite loop, printing "NTFS Volume 3.1" over and over again. Here is the contents of my menu.lst:

Re: Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

It seems that someone modified initrd with NTFS kernel modules so that the kernel was able to see NTFS partitions before mounting the filesystem.

I'm not sure if this is the same problem I am having, but it could be. Can someone clarify if Backtrack is able to boot from an ISO stored on an NTFS partition? And if so, how? Is the "from" cheatcode I used above correct? Or is there a different one I should be using?

Re: Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

Im also seeing this problem. I made a multiboot usb using the tool from pendrive linux. I have dozens of ISO distro's on it, all booting and working fine except the custom bt4 copy, giving me the "NTFS Volume version 3.1" loop.

The new tool formats the drive to NTFS. My guess is the NTFS format is obviously whats bugging it. Im guessing a boot parameter could fix this. Any suggestions???

live-media is the NTFS partition containing your ISO file (could be a /dev/hd* either) Note this the partition device (e.g. /dev/sda2), not the whole drive (/dev/sda).live-media-offset is the offset in bytes from the start of the partition to the first byte of the ISO file. I used WinHex to find this (Open partition, find ISO file, Right-click first byte, "Add Bookmark", offset is shown).

The ISO should now boot.

You'll have to take a look at its own grub menu.lst to change bootup options. If you want to just have one ISO file, you can rebuild it with the new initrd.gz in place of the old one.

Re : Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

Hi,
I'm a total noob so don't beat me down
I experienced this issue of the "NTFS volume version 3.1" followed by a Busybox shell.
To "solve" it I simply removed my hard drive : it worked but then the boot sequence hangs on something like "mounting rootfile" (I don't remember and, consedering I must remove my hard drive to go that "far" I can't check it right away in the public square I'm writing from).
Sometimes it goes a little further, listing my usb devices I guess (removing all them out do not solve the problem).
Suddenly my DVD reader stops and then I have to reboot. All I can write is not taken into account.

I've a Toshiba Satellite x200 and I tried every choices in the boot menu.

AW: Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

Hi everyboy,

thanks for your patch but it doesn't work.

-I have extract the initrd.gz from ISO file (bt4.iso).
-than I apply the patch and get the new initrd.gz file
-now I replace the existing initrd.gz in ISO file
-if I boot these configuration I get the error:

Re: Boot BT4 from ISO on NTFS partition

The patch works great. No problems. I use Syslinux for booting everything and anything including Mac/Chain loading Chameleon. At first I kept getting the NTFS loop. I always use a fat32 partition for all the kernels and images. I have a nice multiboot going. I put the extracted contents of the R2 iso into /BT4 of my booter and adjusted my APPEND line options. I get this loop because it cannot find a root device. It looks in the wrong place hence the loop. So I applied the patch, adjusted the live-media and offset options. Copied the bt4-r2.iso into /BT4. Works great. EvilToken, try to follow this and see if it works. I used backtrack 3 to modify and package the initrd.

There is no need to recreate the iso. All I've done is patched the casper script inside the initrd.gz image. Now we use that for booting. I've copied the vmlinuz off the iso to my syslinux structure. Copied the iso to a custom folder. Used winhex to retrieve the physical offset of the iso file on the sda1 partition. Mine was 462C56C00 = 18836974592 in decimal which is the format we need for the offset. Added this to my cfg.